Gimme Shelter

Are megachurch-goers looking for sanctuary in all the wrong places?by Emily DePrang Published on Tuesday, July 8, 2014, at 10:02 CST

Andrew Roberts

The first time I attended New Hope Church in Manvel, my lip curled so hard it almost closed off one of my nostrils. The problem was cup holders. The seats had them. Instead of wooden pews, the cavernous auditorium—the building map said “auditorium,” not “sanctuary”—had those stadium seats that are like Venus flytraps for your butt, the ones with cup holders built into the armrests. These made it convenient for worshippers to bring their free coffee, orange juice and cookies from the lobby into the not-sanctuary to munch on during service. The cup holders were not, I was disappointed to learn, for super-sized goblets of Communion wine. Rather, the sacred elements came in single-serving plastic kits we picked up from a box on the way into service like tiny, holy Lunchables. How my lip curled.

New Hope is my in-laws’ church, and my in-laws are wonderful people. But New Hope is a megachurch with all the trimmings. It’s nondenominational and the preacher wears blue jeans and my brother-in-law plays drums in the praise band. There’s a praise band.

This is not the church of my childhood. My mother was the organist for the First United Methodist Church of Pearland in my hometown southeast of Houston, and I grew up there. I cried in the nursery, sang in the children’s choir and had my first kiss at a dance in the fellowship hall. I wore a dress every Sunday morning to a traditional service in an airy brick-and-wood sanctuary with a skylight and stained-glass windows. The preacher wore a robe and stole appropriate to the liturgical season. The hymnals (there were hymnals) in the backs of the pews (there were pews) contained delicate, diaphanous pages that noted each hymn’s origins. “O Word of God Incarnate,” for example, combined words written in 1867 with music from 1693 and a harmony by Mendelssohn. Worship felt like it had lineage and gravity. Everything about it suggested connection to something bigger and older than me, something set apart from daily life.

We also walked uphill to school both ways, teenagers didn’t wear their Walkmans in restaurants, and you kids better get off my lawn. I can hear how it sounds when I talk about my childhood church, like Vaseline is smeared on my memory’s lens. But that’s where I come from, and the price of loving where you come from is that it’s forever hard to love someplace new. I haven’t attended a church steadily since I left home for college 15 years ago, partly because I’ve become cynical, judgmental and analytical, but partly because the churches I have visited—those attended by my more devout loved ones—have been megachurches. I’ve been to several now, some dozens of times, but have never been able to relax at a megachurch. I can’t quiet my brain, center myself, and focus on God. My dislike distracts me.

The truth is, it’s more than dislike. I hate megachurches. I’m suspicious of their size and their charismatic leaders. I hate the new building style, slick and hygienic, branded, like a corporate compound. I hate the giant screens. And I really hate the music, the Christian Top-40 soft rock so melodically predictable you can sing along the first time you hear it, with lyrics that sound less written than generated by software called Praize 2.0. If you can replace “Jesus” with “baby” and the song still makes sense, it is not, to my mind, a good hymn.

But here’s another truth: Everything old was once new. When I flip again through my Methodist hymnal, I notice that the 1870s and 1880s were big years for new hymns. If I’d been born in 1850, I probably would have curled my lip at the 1887 hit “Lead On, O King Eternal.” As for technology, the organ my mom played was electric, not pipe, which was probably heresy to some church snobs older of school. Speaking of heresy, I grew up with female preachers—definitely, to previous generations, a bigger deal than cup holders.

This set me thinking. Is there actually anything wrong with megachurches or is my beef purely aesthetic? If the latter, is it a matter of high and low taste, or is it like the way I only love country music written during the years I had a crush on a teenage cowboy in my youth group? Do I miss the way church was back then, or the way I was—as un-cynical, un-judgmental and un-analytical as when I toured East Texas in a van with a youth choir performing a ’50s-themed Christian musical called “Let’s Go to the Rock”?

Obviously, nostalgia plays a role. I’m not sure I’ve ever been as happy as I was during that choir tour. And yes, the megachurches I’ve seen aren’t stylistically to my liking and there’s nothing wrong with that, them or me. But is there something wrong with megachurches themselves? And is that question stupidly broad, like asking, “Is freedom a good thing?” Or do megachurches, as a genus, share DNA that manifests in certain traits that can be evaluated?

If I could understand my megachurch prejudice, maybe I could undo it. Maybe I could find the same fulfillment my in-laws and millions of other people experience at big, joyful worship services every Sunday. It hasn’t escaped me that my attitude problem is possibly an effect of my lapse in churchgoing, not a cause. Faith is a good antidote for cynicism, compassion for judgment, and humility for excessive analysis. I no longer get a weekly reminder to cultivate those traits, and I haven’t for a long time.

But church was never merely a place to hear self-improvement pep talks or meet boys who shared my intimacy issues. Jesus said that wherever two or more were gathered in His name, He would be with them, and I felt that at my old church. In quiet moments during service, it seemed like I could lean my head on Jesus’ shoulder and feel its warmth. If I understood my hang-ups better, could I find that peace, as so many do, at a megachurch?

To figure it out, I dove straight into the deep end: Lakewood Church.

About 45,000 people attend worship service at Lakewood every week. Researchers define megachurches as Protestant congregations with an average weekly attendance of 2,000 people or more, so Lakewood is more of a gigachurch. Housed in a refurbished arena near downtown Houston, it’s the largest church in the nation by at least 10,000 people. I may as well have researched acrophobia through skydiving.

Lakewood is near my apartment, but even if it weren’t, I wouldn’t have had to go far to find another. Texas is arguably the nation’s megachurch capital. Of the 1,600 or so megachurches in the U.S., California has slightly more—218 to Texas’ 206—but 11 of the 50 biggest are here, far more behemoths than in any other state. Houston alone has four churches in the nation’s top 50, Dallas-Fort Worth has three, San Antonio has two, and El Paso and Plano each have one. Weekly attendance at just those 11 churches about equals the population of Lubbock.

Though I showed up to Lakewood 10 minutes late for Sunday service, tributaries of people were still streaming from the parking garages (plural) into the sharp morning light, diversely dressed: jeans and three-piece suits, sequins, 5-inch heels, baseball caps, and ladies’ hats with netting and flowers. This assortment pleased me. I was raised to get fancy for church as a sign of respect—you’re paying God a house call, after all—but it’s easy to see how a crowd wearing nothing but dresses and suits could seem unwelcoming to a churchgoer without a will or a way to conform. That said, I’ve seen some congregations so sartorially chill that a man in slacks looks like a narc. The nice thing about Lakewood is, it’s big enough that you could probably show up in white tie and tails with a foam mascot head and not be the only one.

Inside, the air was so crisp it seemed shiny. Ushers directed the throng up escalators to the balcony, since the floor seats and first tier were long since full. This building was once The Summit, then Compaq Center, both home to the Rockets. It hosted countless concerts, games and ice skating spectaculars for almost 30 years before Lakewood leased it in 2003, then bought it outright in 2010. A thrumming bass line leaked from the auditorium. If this were 1977, I could be hearing Led Zeppelin.

A church taking over a stadium sounds like mid-’90s postmodern satire, but like many things at Lakewood, it’s handled so matter-of-factly that an observer can think, I guess it’s not that weird. This worries me about mega groups in general. Humans are herd animals, and the bigger the herd, the more powerful the instinct to react like everyone else does. Forty-five thousand people is a big herd. Even if you don’t identify strongly with a group, even if you consider yourself an outsider like I did at Lakewood, your responses and perceptions will be shaped by the faces around you. Every unbothered expression will concur: This is normal. That’s how it took me half a day to decide that, no really, the huge banners up and down the hallways of Lakewood advertising Pastor Joel Osteen’s new book are, in fact, weird for a church.

I found a seat up high and to the side. The bass thumped my chest. On stage, four singers and a full band rocked out, accompanied by a 100-person choir, grand piano, brass section and dedicated bongo player. The music was catchy and joyful and lots of people sang along. It was also anodyne, of course, but it got the job done. The crowd was on its feet.

My feelings were mixed. On the one hand, Lakewood provides an uplifting, high-quality live concert every week for free, and that’s a public service no matter your orthodoxy. On the other hand, you can hear pop music anywhere. Church is often the first or only exposure many people have to choral music, old music, and complicated music, but you’re not going to find any of that at most megachurches. It’s been traded for instant accessibility.

That’s by design. Sociological theory holds that religious commitment is produced by rituals creating “collective effervescence,” a powerful, shared emotional experience of unity and purpose. Collective effervescence requires four ingredients: bodily assembly, a mutual focus of attention, a shared mood, and barriers excluding outsiders, the last of which often takes the form of institutional knowledge. Church attendance used to involve a lot of this knowledge: what to wear, when to stand up and sit down, the tunes to the hymns and so on. The more stuff there is to know, the greater the feeling of belonging you get from knowing it. A University of Washington study of megachurchesnoted that they have jettisoned almost anything that could make newcomers feel excluded, meaning traditional liturgy, formal worship and old or non-pop music.

Reading this furrowed my brow. Could it be that the reason I like saying the Apostles’ Creed is not just that it’s a beautiful statement of faith written in the eighth century, but also that I feel smug about being able to recite it from memory? Yeah. It could totally also be that. Put another way, I realized I retain raised-in-church privilege. When megachurches rob me of the chance to show off my hymn-singing, ancient-text-knowing, appropriate-time-standing-up skills, I get cranky. Well sure, it turns out I’m sort of thinking, if you want just anybody to feel welcome… I started to wonder how much of the collective effervescence I felt at my old church had to do with cultural exclusivity.

There’s definitely something lost in making worship a purely contemporary affair. But it’s not like megachurches are forcing other churches to stop chanting creepily in unison, which, for the record, I love. Almost three-fourths of megachurches identify as “evangelical,” meaning they believe you have to have a personal conversion experience to avoid Hell, and are focused on saving as many people as possible from that fate. In other words, they don’t exist to expand people’s cultural horizons. If the type of music my dad calls “Jesus Is My Boyfriend” rescues more souls from eternal torment than Bach, I can see why they use it.

Despite doing away with most barriers to outsiders, megachurches still create boatloads of collective effervescence. The University of Washington study says that’s because what they lack in exclusivity they make up in size—the “bodily assembly” part of the ritual. Witnessing others having the same experience as yours amplifies it. It’s why people go to a bar to watch the big game.

But when a crowd gets so big, how do you make sure they’re witnessing what you want them to? Screens. Above the Lakewood stage, a Jumbotron and two smaller still-Huge-o-trons cut between close-ups of the musicians and the audience. White hands clutch a silver glitter guitar, then a man dances with a baby; a Cyndi Lauper look-alike belts praise in black leather, then a woman sways with her eyes closed and palms raised. Beams of colored light stroke people’s faces. The ceiling, a quilted metal mesh lit from within, flows from purple to orange to royal blue as the band downshifts into a Jesus-praising slow jam. The entire thing was designed to create the “shared mood” component of effective ritual. Onscreen, a camera shot taken from the back of the arena with a fisheye lens captured the whole spectacular shebang.

I loathed that I couldn’t keep my attention focused on the actual people on stage, that the screens always won. But I won’t spend much time here hating on screens, because they’re plainly practical for giant congregations. The cathedrals of Europe don’t have them, but they have lots of other things to look at. Besides, I might use the word “newfangled,” and that would embarrass us all.

After the opening jam session, Pastor Joel Osteen came out to welcome the crowd. Sporting a charcoal suit, lavender tie, and a dark corona of immobile hair, he’s preacher-handsome—that is, handsome enough, but not too much. Osteen resembles a greyhound with his small eyes and general pointiness, but his grin could melt butter, and it never goes away. He talks with his mouth hitched to the side just enough to set off one dimple. It complements his drawl.

“There are blessings with your name on them,” Osteen said. “Healing with your name on it. Promotion. Good breaks.” He looked right into the camera and we were all watching the screens, so it seemed as if he was talking directly to each of us.“How long are you going to wait before you believe you’re strong, talented, blessed, favored, equipped, one of a kind?” he asked. The whole sermon was like that.

Osteen and I are strangers, but his praise still felt tender and good, like having my hair stroked. I wondered how many people in the arena never hear words like that except here. I’d show up every week too.

Plenty of people want Osteen’s message. Besides the massive flock in attendance, 10 million households receive Lakewood’s TV broadcast, and millions more watch services at the church website. Almost 2.7 million people follow Osteen on Twitter. (Sample tweet: “You don’t have to go through life doing everything on your own. You have an advantage. God has placed His anointing on you.”) All six of Osteen’s books have summited the New York Times bestseller list. There have been tsars with less reach.

Osteen’s popularity is an extreme case, but the role it plays in Lakewood’s success is not. Research by the Hartford Institute found that nearly all megachurches revolve around a sole, long-tenured, dominant, male pastor. It also suggested that such a figure is a prerequisite for a church becoming mega. One element of successful ritual is a shared focus of attention, which pastors like Osteen provide. They give megachurches a gravitational core around which everything else can swirl.

This is different from the church of my youth. In the Methodist tradition, pastors are moved every few years specifically to keep churches from becoming too dependent on one person, too focused on an earthly authority rather than a heavenly one. The University of Washington study, whose researchers interviewed hundreds of megachurch-goers, noted, “Often, members would say that the pastor is not the object of their worship, and yet, in nearly the same breath, they would announce the unique spiritual power of the pastor to deliver the word of God, even referring to him as God’s ‘mouthpiece,’ ‘messenger,’ or ‘vessel.’”

Osteen unquestionably holds this status. At one point during service, his wife, Victoria, delivered a homily on persistence using him as an example. Joel, who has no pastoral training, inherited Lakewood from his father, its founder, who died in 1999. Apparently the early days were rocky. “Can you imagine if Joel would have given up?” Victoria asked. “We wouldn’t be sitting in here today, in this capacity, hearing this voice from Almighty God.”

Use of such terms isn’t quite Old Testament-level idolatry, but those squeamish about hero worship should maybe not go to Lakewood. When the service ended, more than 100 people queued to meet Osteen, who was flanked by armed off-duty cops. Dozens more fans stood to the side to take his picture. Like the giant screens, the rope line felt a little icky, but it’s probably the only way to do business on this scale, and it’s better than if Osteen just disappeared after service like a would-be Elvis. Besides, I can’t judge. I once paid $40 for a hug from the guy who played Xander on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

While I watched people snapping selfies with Osteen in the background, a man stopped in front of me and crouched down. He was showing his young daughter where Osteen had signed her tiny Bible. Okay, that’s weird, I thought. Does nobody else think that’s weird?Isn’t signing the title page what authors do?

Osteen may not have written the Bible, but he branded his own: the Hope For Today Bible. Studded with Osteen’s “Hope Notes,” it’s a New Living Translation™ that its publishers say aims to “make the same impact in the life of modern readers that the original text had for the original readers … by translating entire thoughts (rather than just words) into natural, everyday English.” This strikes me as a very megachurch approach to scripture—pre-chewed, flavor added.

You can buy the Hope for Today Bible and Osteen’s other books and their spin-off journals, devotionals and study guides at any of Lakewood’s “resource centers,” open before and after services. Back in the arena’s concert days, these recessed booths sold concessions and merchandise; now they hawk the products of Osteen’s media empire. Osteen, who gave up his church salary in 2005 after his first book turned blockbuster, is reportedly worth $40 million.

I’m not among those who think Osteen’s wealth makes him suspect, though Jesus did say, as the New Living Translation so eloquently puts it, “It is very hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” But the resource centers struck me as crass bordering on sacrilegious. They made the service seem like a long commercial.

The weird thing is, I almost wanted to line up and buy an Osteen book anyway. That’s when it finally hit me, what I hate about megachurches. It’s not the pop music or the blue jeans. Any small church can have those things. It’s not the screens; my home church in Pearland installed two screens a few years ago for no discernible reason. It’s not even the mass devotion to a single authority figure; the world is full of good and bad preachers with flocks of every size.

No, it’s the control. When I attend a megachurch, I feel like I’m not safe, like I have to stay on guard because all my impressions are being so effectively, relentlessly managed. Unlike my other quibbles, this one is endemic to megachurches. It is a trait of the breed.

For a church to go mega, it has to provide a consistent product that appeals to a huge, diverse audience. If you’re selling an object, you can design a machine to make that object exactly the same way every time. But since what churches produce is a feeling—collective effervescence, emotional energy, hope for tomorrow, whatever—the churches that become mega are the ones that have mastered making people feel exactly what they’re supposed to, the same way, every time. Doing that requires managing every aspect of the worship experience, right down to giving people a place to put their cups.

I bridle at this control. I don’t want everything I see, hear, and feel to be optimized for maximum impact. I don’t want from church what I get from a movie. I know megachurches spiritually nourish millions of people, uplift them, provide them with community and perform good works. There’s nothing wrong with megachurches. But when I worship, I want to be still and focus on God. I want to feel like I’ve stepped into a place that’s separate from the world, not exactly like it, only Jesus-themed.

Emily DePrang joined The Texas Observer in 2011 as a staff writer covering criminal justice and public health. Before that, she was nonfiction editor of the Sonora Review. Before that, she was a waitress. She's also appeared in The Atlantic, Salon.com, and VICE. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Arizona and has won some things, including the Public Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists (2012), the National Health Journalism Fellowship from USC Annenberg (2013), and a nomination for a National Magazine Award in Reporting (2014). She still sometimes thinks about waitressing.

oldwhiteguy

With all irony intended, oh, my Lord. Do we not see what’s going on here? We’ve substituted churches telling us how good we should be for churches telling us how good we are. This is the religion of the sated, an adoration of the mentally obese. This is why these people think conservative and vote to the right. To them, there are no problems, at least not any of their own doing. They’ve stopped striving spiritually. They feel guilt, so they need someone to tell them they simply shouldn’t feel that way. We’ve substituted stadium chairs for pews. What next? Aisles of Laz-E-Boys and waiters with champagne top off’s? This is America, land of the free-from-pain. Close the borders, shut down the clinics, roll up the food stamps and tell me again how wonderful I am. See you at Sunday service.

Dicky Neely

This is an excellent, comment in my opinion. I rarely read comments on any site that are worth reading and I try to keep the practice to a minimum, but sir, oldwhiteguy, you proved an exception to the rule. Well done! …from another old white guy.

Ken Reed

I join Dicky Neely in complimenting oldwhiteguy, but mostly want to salute Emily DePrang for such an insightful article. I’ve not been to Lakewood; heard Osteen only in his brief TV interviews, but she coalesced all my scattered thoughts about his operation, and megachurches in general. I too grew up in the Methodist church, and love both the older music and much of the new. I say we need more of that good old-time religion. Hail, Zeus!

Dicky Neely

I agree, the article by Emily DePrang is excellent and gives a clear look at the Osteen money maker. It’s interesting how “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into heaven” became “It is very hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” If the preachers of the TV mega churches really believed what they are preaching they might be a little afraid.

1bimbo

horsesh*t, no way you read that wall of sarcastic text

Dicky Neely

Must have hit you close to home huh?

http://rhymeswithright.mu.nu RhymesWithRight

I’m one of those conservative Christians you seem to hate, but I have to give you credit for something here — Lakewood is, at best, “Christianity-lite”. Say what you want about Joel’s late father, no one ever accused him of straying from orthodoxy or setting aside Scripture in the name of something else. My wife and I — both seminary trained — used to find things to criticize about the older Osteen and his theological stance on some issues, but we never even came close to making the assessment we do of the younger Osteen and his cotton-candy church.

Brian P.

You forgot to say that’s why Jesus died for me.

houston100

EMILY, living in Houston as you do, you need only go to the 3rd Ward or the 5th Ward to find a (TINY) church on every single block, there seems to be hundreds of them in the two neighborhoods mentioned, alone.

No need PERIOD, for you to have to go attend some (HUGE) mega-church like Lakewood, where you’re so uncomfortable, Ms Emily

Cycle_One

“Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions….there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.”
– The Mysterious Stranger

Andrew_Dobbs

Superb. Very well written. Thank you!

chuke

Great article. I’m a lot older, but boy do I identify. While I understand and appreciate that megachurches appeal to lots of folks, my granddaughters included, they are too commercial for me. I see way too many money changers in the temples these days. When I go to a website for a church, and the first thing I see are ads for products, I flee. I predict the megachurch trend will diminish over time, particularly if the congregants in those churches don’t find and live the essential truth that Jesus came here to teach us–the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

Hi Emily, I resonate with some of the difficulties you mention in this article. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. One thing I feel like I heard you say was you desire a true intimacy with the Almighty God and you may have experienced that when you were younger. In this day and age it can be a blessing and a curse that there are so many different flavors of churches to choose from. The blessing is that you have many opportunities to find the place that you call your church home or family. The curse can be that there are so many that our views of Christianity can get skewed. Before we can ever think about the “right” church to go to, we need to examine where our own hearts are at. Are we ready to find one? Are we looking for the one that “fits” my personality? Are we looking for the one that has the music we like, the preacher that preaches the way we want, the building we like, the distance from our home, the mid-morning service, the type of outreach they do? The qualities can go on an on. When we’re asking those questions the common them is that we are making church about ourselves rather than about the One who we go to church to worship. In chapter 4 of the book of John in the bible Jesus responds to a woman who is questioning how to worship by saying, “…the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him”. Jesus is more concerned with the hearts of the people rather than the buildings, song selection, aesthetics, clothing selection etc.

Emily, I want to encourage you as you struggle with the modern day “pharisaical” behavior of some churches to seek wisdom from God’s truth in scripture. The truth is that He loves you, sings over you and as a matter of fact, sent His Son Jesus Christ to the cross so that you can be free from the sting of death. When we understand the depth of our own sinfulness and the glory of the shed blood on the cross, we have nothing else to do but worship. Part of that worship will spur us to seek a Gospel centered church that truly does worship in Spirit and Truth. They are out there. Pray that God will lead to one. I will be praying for you too. God bless.

Jason

Courtney Robertson

If the Observer aimed to do a critique of Joel Osteen, it might have been better to look at what Joel and Victoria Osteen do and say rather than give a detailed analysis of what kind of building they preach from. I don’t think Joel Osteen can help it if people want to take his picture after the service. He stands there after every service to meet visitors and to help people with their problems; and, if people want him to sign their Bible–if that makes them happy–who cares (besides Emily)? The resource centers are there to help people too, and yes, not surprisingly, it costs a little money to get, for example, CDs of the pastor’s sermon (the last time I went to Lakewood, a CD with a sermon cost all of $5). If a church aims to bring in as many people as possible to a relationship with Christ–and they buy a former sports facility to do it and installs jumbotrons so a large number of people can see the pastor when he speaks–I’m all for it.
I don’t know at what stage of development it is in, but Victoria and Joel Osteen have given a lot of money to create a children’s home in Houston, and they plan to build more. They give their time to many people. Their messages are designed to encourage people, and to bring them closer to God so that they can serve others in turn. There’s a lot of things that can be said about what the Osteens do and say; while you can’t find that in this article, you can maybe go to the church and listen–or you can be distracted by a poster promoting a book designed to help people.